The Diablo III Website announces a new automatic patch is now available for Diablo III to update Blizzard's action/RPG sequel to version 1.0.3.b. This is for the Americas, and users are warned this will interfere with cross-region play until all territories are in sync. Here are the patch notes:

Auction House

Bug Fixes

The "Bid" and "Buyout" buttons will now be correctly grayed-out in the confirmation window when attempting to purchase an item with insufficient gold

Bug Fixes

General

Fixed a bug where leaving a heavily-populated General chat channel would prevent players from rejoining any General chat channel until they logged out and logged back in

Fixed several tooltip-related bugs that were occurring when viewing items with 2 or more sockets in the auction house and profile pages

Hornet303 wrote on Jul 10, 2012, 14:30:It's sad. I told myself I wont click on the Comments link anymore on this site, but I wanted to see the patch notes. It's almost like clicking on a link in an email that you know that you should just type in the URL yourself.

I started gaming on the PC in the early 80's and still keep up OK with the new releases on both console and PC. Its just sad to be able to predict how many people will post on any D3 news article who bash the living crap out of this game.

I bought D3 on release, Im playing 5-10 hours a week with friends and having a good time along the way. 1/2 way through nightmare right now.

Anyway, it just bums me out that the PC scene is so angry all the time. Its like seeing a spokesman for a certain group on TV representing your group. I just keep saying to myself "we're not all that bad, some people are content".

Reasons are pretty simple why there's so much bashing:

1. D3 is not a Diablo game except in story (which is also garbage).2. Blizzard is not the Blizzard we knew. Blizzard is a load of pompus blowhard money grubbing jackoffs in the disguise of the old Blizzard who used to care about their customers and produce solid games.3. PC Gamers are tired of shit consolish games getting PC praise by shit console gamers.4. D3 sucks. But honestly, is there even any reason needed other than this? If so, read 1-3.

1. Yes, it is. You're being foolish thinking of D2 with rose colored glasses, because the D2 you remember is NOT the D2 that was released. 10 years and 2 expansions changes a lot. Dont be stupid.

And 15% of a game the size of Diablo 3 to simply integrate with a payment system seems a bit of a high estimate. I've actually done that work myself as a developer and it's not particularly difficult.

I wouldn't be surprised if it were 10+ % of the project schedule with coding and testing. You are looking at possibly millions of people banging on the RMAH and trying to hack it etc. Acti-Blizz has to be VERY careful with $$$ transactions (legal issues). Thats great that you have developed before, but I doubt you have handled code for thousands of $$ transactions. I'm sure it's more then "it's not particularly difficult". Hell, even PvP didn't make it into release...

Given all the years this game was in development, I have to wonder how many times they started over. There's no way the game they released should have taken anywhere near that long.

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell (I think...)

the fun I have with D3, is to beat blizzard at their own game, that is by finding low gold cost deals at the GAH, that keeps me alive and kicking well into inferno.

the entire auction house , is nothing but adaptive algorithmic blizzard bots, anyhow. I don't care if you insist I wear a tinfoil hat, I smell things in this game, that many of you can't if you were born yesterday.

I play this game for fun, and like trying different builds from time to time, I play very casually, and will enrage you for sure, if you spend all your days and nights at it. to each his own. The gameplay mechanics, and awesomeness of tons of monsters in a good 4p matchup, on a decent rig, is quite well done, despite the Casino complex this game is running on.

remember, the house always wins.

the videogame industry is reaping in Billions of dollars this decade, they will stop at nothing when they have an audience, that are devout Diablo players. all of our complaints are noted, but the next TOS in Diablo4 won't change a thing, except for you to sign over your 'last will and testament' in order to authenticate to BNet 3.0 come 8 years from now.

And 15% of a game the size of Diablo 3 to simply integrate with a payment system seems a bit of a high estimate. I've actually done that work myself as a developer and it's not particularly difficult.

I wouldn't be surprised if it were 10+ % of the project schedule with coding and testing. You are looking at possibly millions of people banging on the RMAH and trying to hack it etc. Acti-Blizz has to be VERY careful with $$$ transactions (legal issues). Thats great that you have developed before, but I doubt you have handled code for thousands of $$ transactions. I'm sure it's more then "it's not particularly difficult". Hell, even PvP didn't make it into release...

I mean how long could it take to provide an interface to trade items? The interface isn't even particularly good.

Well, they have to integrate into Pay Pal and other money channels, so it probably wasn't 2 days of coding and testing. That takes time out of the project schedule period. So lets say they used 15% of their project schedule for RMAH, that took away from the core game.

I suppose its certainly possible. But the trading part of items and integrating with paypal could certainly be done by someone who was not designing the core game and I would find it surprising if the same folks were working on that piece. And 15% of a game the size of Diablo 3 to simply integrate with a payment system seems a bit of a high estimate. I've actually done that work myself as a developer and it's not particularly difficult.

I mean how long could it take to provide an interface to trade items? The interface isn't even particularly good.

Well, they have to integrate into Pay Pal and other money channels, so it probably wasn't 2 days of coding and testing. That takes time out of the project schedule period. So lets say they used 15% of their project schedule for RMAH, that took away from the core game.

Undocumented Alien wrote on Jul 11, 2012, 08:41:D3 is the same, the devs spent to much time on the RMAH and not enough on the main gameplay.

I dunno, that just seems like speculation. I mean how long could it take to provide an interface to trade items? The interface isn't even particularly good.

I think they just made a lot of design decisions to try to balance things and ended up watering things down too much.

I agree. I think they took the MMO style approach to the game and this is most evident in a few of Bashioks replies to questions. One of them was something like "this is an online game, it will have economy and balance" even though there are practically no competitive elements to the game and it is not an MMO. People want the crazy things like items that boost skills or grant auras, crafting weapons through sockets and runes, collecting interesting items at every level and so on. It's OK for the game to be a bit unbalanced and crazy, that's what people loved about the originals.

The main thing that bothers me about Diablo3 is that it feels like a single player game.

That makes sense as that's the game lineage. A SP game (first) with COOP. Acti-Blizz has used a shoehorn to make the game fit a MMO-Lite mold, but as you have seen, it's still a SP game with COOP, they are just forcing an online DRM to push people into using the RMAH.

In actuality you get punished for playing with other people unless their DPS can keep up with the increased mob health. It's a really silly design overall and was even worse when mobs did more damage (thank god they listened to reason on that one).

I really have to question why they don't put in some new doodads for maps or layouts for places. I think the replayability of this game would go up quite a bit if it didn't feel like every game was exactly the same. They do scheduled maintenance every week (for what? They never did that shit for D2 and half the time, I have no idea why the servers were taken down), and that seems like something that really wouldn't take THAT much time. Just add some more pieces for the map jigsaw every now and then and it'd feel a lot better.

I talked with a friend about randomness in D2, and came to the realization that act 5 really wasn't all that different from D3 as far as maps went. The outdoor areas were really limited in how random they could be, with just the inner parts of the maps being truly random in a lot of the cases, and the indoor areas were pretty random. The biggest difference was sometimes you were going up and to the left to get to the crystalline passage and sometimes you were going up and to the right. That's not really all that different from what we have with D3; however, just the changes in directions and alternative maps for the outdoor areas tricked me into believing that the act was more random than it really was. It doesn't seem like that would have taken THAT much time to add multiple layouts to the outdoor areas to give the illusion of randomness.

Also, when they went back in 1.09 (or whenever they did it) and added random monster types in hell A5, it really helped with the replayability of the act. I hope they do something like that in the D3 expansions -- bring back monster types from all over the game and random the shit out of those. They don't have to explain why there are suddenly snake guys and succubi in act 5 for inferno, they're just there.

The main thing that bothers me about Diablo3 is that it feels like a single player game. I dont feel COMPELLED to join open public games, the game doesnt reward me for doing that (ie I dont get quests if Im not the party leader) and usually it ends up punishing me by teaming me up with complete and utter noobs....

I like the game, dont get me wrong, but Im beginning to feel the burnout...Maybe I should start a new character...

Yep. Makes you wonder what they spent all their time in development doing.

One of the mains reason HG:L failed, the dev team spent to much time worrying about money grab tech (adverts, subscription interface) and not enough on gameplay.

D3 is the same, the devs spent to much time on the RMAH and not enough on the main gameplay. Granted D3 is better then HG:L, however, their failings to make a great game came at the expense of greed.

Was better when the business model was, "We'll make millions by making a great game.". Nowadays its, "Lets make an OK game leveraging highly visible brand names (reason why D3 sold like it did) that has MT/RMAH/Sub in it."

Wowbagger_TIP wrote on Jul 11, 2012, 00:53:For all the defense of D3 by some here, it's still mind-boggling that they spent so much time on it and then churned out broken crap at the end with game mechanics that they apparently slapped together over the course of the last month or so before release. No wonder things are so screwed up.

Yep. Makes you wonder what they spent all their time in development doing.

As much as people like to claim that Diablo 2/LoD had more character customization, no one likes to talk about how their first few characters were totally useless because they put a skill point or stat point in the wrong ability or stat.

That's nothing but hyperbole. There are no characters that become completely useless because of a single skill/stat point.

Whether you believe it or not there are a multitude of builds that are successful in Diablo 3, including melee wizards, ranged barbarians... hell I've even seen people mess around with melee demon hunters to some degree of success.

And what "degree of success" are you using? How far in the game do you have to get to be "sucessful"? You can't make the claim a single skill point gone awry will make a character "totally useless", and then claim that as long as you've got "some degree of success", the character is fine.

Go look at how many viable Hell builds there are for characters in D2, then go look at how many viable Inferno builds there are for characters in D3. You'll find there are more for D2 than D3.

Well to be fair, hell in 2 is far easier than inferno in 3

Mostly because Blizz didn't bother to playtest and balance Inferno before releasing.

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell (I think...)

As much as people like to claim that Diablo 2/LoD had more character customization, no one likes to talk about how their first few characters were totally useless because they put a skill point or stat point in the wrong ability or stat.

That's nothing but hyperbole. There are no characters that become completely useless because of a single skill/stat point.

Whether you believe it or not there are a multitude of builds that are successful in Diablo 3, including melee wizards, ranged barbarians... hell I've even seen people mess around with melee demon hunters to some degree of success.

And what "degree of success" are you using? How far in the game do you have to get to be "sucessful"? You can't make the claim a single skill point gone awry will make a character "totally useless", and then claim that as long as you've got "some degree of success", the character is fine.

Go look at how many viable Hell builds there are for characters in D2, then go look at how many viable Inferno builds there are for characters in D3. You'll find there are more for D2 than D3.

For all the defense of D3 by some here, it's still mind-boggling that they spent so much time on it and then churned out broken crap at the end with game mechanics that they apparently slapped together over the course of the last month or so before release. No wonder things are so screwed up.

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell (I think...)

As much as people like to claim that Diablo 2/LoD had more character customization, no one likes to talk about how their first few characters were totally useless because they put a skill point or stat point in the wrong ability or stat.

That's nothing but hyperbole. There are no characters that become completely useless because of a single skill/stat point.

Whether you believe it or not there are a multitude of builds that are successful in Diablo 3, including melee wizards, ranged barbarians... hell I've even seen people mess around with melee demon hunters to some degree of success.

And what "degree of success" are you using? How far in the game do you have to get to be "sucessful"? You can't make the claim a single skill point gone awry will make a character "totally useless", and then claim that as long as you've got "some degree of success", the character is fine.

Go look at how many viable Hell builds there are for characters in D2, then go look at how many viable Inferno builds there are for characters in D3. You'll find there are more for D2 than D3.

Hornet303 wrote on Jul 10, 2012, 14:30:It's sad. I told myself I wont click on the Comments link anymore on this site, but I wanted to see the patch notes. It's almost like clicking on a link in an email that you know that you should just type in the URL yourself. I started gaming on the PC in the early 80's and still keep up OK with the new releases on both console and PC. Its just sad to be able to predict how many people will post on any D3 news article who bash the living crap out of this game.

Nobody is going to point out that this guy's post was #4 and there was only one negative post before it? Fine I will.

If your prediction before clicking the comments link was one you'd be right.